Saturday, July 11, 2015

This post is a result of the article that was published in the Washington Post regarding the new United States Digital Services coming out of the Obama Administration (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11/white-house-launches-u-s-digital-service-with-healthcare-gov-fixer-at-the-helm/). It's a great idea. It's a noble idea. I am personally working with some members of that team. They are wonderful, talented, amazing leaders in their fields. But when the lead architect/developer referes to usability testing as 508 testing and another member of the team whose background is a dual degree in coding and management mentions that their product teams have some people called UX researchers they call to conduct usability testing after their product is designed ... that makes me, as one of those pesky UX researcher people, worry.

You see, as one of those UX researchers, I wholeheartedly believe that in this quest to innovate and move our old slowmoving technology into the modern world, we are leaving the most important variable behind. Our user. We are not Google. We are not Facebook. Our users come to us to apply for services that we cannot afford for them to not understand. I have read the backgrounds of the brilliant minds who've been hired to move us into the 20th century of technology that's eluded us in the Federal government (due to funding, policy and other concerns that don't hound the private industry). I don't see anybody who's putting the user in the center and saying keep him in mind. As one of those UX researcher people, I believe the user needs to be involved in the entire process. Because for some things, the user doesn't care for flashiness. A social media platform can be flashy. A disability application needs to be easy to fill, easy to read, easy to navigate, easy to know what's going to happen afterwards ... But I could be wrong. What do I know? I am not the user! We can change the code, we can change the database, we can change the colors ... if you don't ask the people who are going to interact with it in the end while we are making those changes, it could still fail at the end.

It costs pennies to make a change at the blueprint stage, dollars to knowck down walls at the framing stage and millions after you're conducting the final walkthrough of a house. So, when would you rather ask a homebuilder what changes they want?